MONITORING CEREBRAL BLOOD FLOW FOR OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF RELATIONSHIP PRODUCTIVITY AND THERMAL ENVIRONMENT

It is difficult to evaluate the effect of indoor environmental quality on productivity by measuring only taskperformance. In this study, the monitoring of cerebral blood flow during task by Near InfraredSpectroscopy is introduced as one of the objective evaluation methods of workers human responsethat are factors affecting task performance. The results of three subjective experiments showed thatmonitoring cerebral blood flow can be applied to evaluation of mental demand level they need to do tasks.The higher mental demand was required, the more the left side of ?total hemoglobin concentrationbecame. The results of the subjective experiments in moderately hot environment show that the mentaldemand level to maintain their task performance was higher in hotter environment than that in thermalneutral environment.